We had the first frost of the year the other morning. I love a hard frost, so clean and bright after unmemorable November days of rain and muck. It prompted me to dig out this poem of mine, to which there is a tale. When it first appeared in one of my collections one reviewer was kind enough to single it out for praise as a particularly fine sonnet. Sonnet? I looked at it. I counted the lines. Yep, fourteen. And the rhymes seemed to be in the right place. Well, well, so it was. I was rather impressed with myself. I had as usual just let the poem take the form it seemed to want to take, and had simply not noticed that this particular form had a name. I still can’t decide whether to write a sonnet by accident shows genius or a distressing lack of formal awareness. Naturally I incline to the former view…

Worm-hole: the reference is to the cosmologists’ speculation that there might be passages connecting one universe to another. In this case connecting our universe to a universe of joy and wonder, which is perhaps just our own seen with new eyes.

Fern-seed: as well as being very small, fern-seed (more properly fern spores) was thought in mediaeval times to have magical properties, enabling one to become invisible, see into the future, and stay forever young. Cf. Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’: ‘we have the receipt of fern seed; we walk invisible’.

From The Train

From the train at dawn, on ploughland, frost
Blue-white in the shadow of a wood.
Oh, you again, of all moods soonest lost
And most elusive and least understood.
What should I call you? Vision? Empathy?
Elation’s tunnel? Worm-hole of rejoicing?
Some bliss of childhood, reasonless and free,
The secret microcosms … What a thing
To have no name for, yet to live for, these
Curious contentments under all,
These moments of a planet: weathers, trees –
What dreams, what intimations, fern-seed small,
Are buried in my days, that I must find,
And recognise, and lose, and leave behind?

David Sutton